Grant Virgin: Palm Desert teen's long road to recovery

Months after he was left for dead by a hit-and-run driver, Grant Virgin works to overcome a traumatic brain injury

Dec. 24, 2012

Grant Virgin breaks into laughter as Elizabeth Mugford, a speech pathologist with rehabilitation services at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, tries to guess the animal on the card on her head during a therapy session. The Palm Desert teen is recovering from an almost fatal hit-and-run that occurred on Sept. 10. / Richard Lui/The Desert Sun

How to help

Leslie Locken, the property manager at Old Town La Quinta, organized a Nov. 9 concert fundraiser for Grant Virgin to help cover medical costs. She continues to accept checks payable to The Fund for Grant Virgin at her office: Old Town La Quinta, 78010 Main St., Suite No. 201, La Quinta, CA. 92253 The family also accepts donations to cover medical costs via www.paypal.com. Send the transaction to grantvirginfund@gmail.com.

It has been more than three months since the Palm Desert High School junior suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in a hit-and-run crash.

Grant was walking to a friend’s house when he was struck about 7:35 p.m. Sept. 10 at Deep Canyon Road and Fred Waring Drive in Palm Desert.

Several witnesses saw a woman get out of her car, survey the damage to her vehicle and look at the boy lying in the road, Capt. Kevin Vest said. Then, she drove away and has not been found.

The crash rocked Grant’s brain and crushed his aorta. The vast majority of people don’t survive the initial moments of that kind of injury.

Bones were fractured from head to toe — his skull, his clavicle, both femurs and his heel. He had lacerations to his spleen and his liver.

Doctors gave him the lowest possible score on several measures — a coma scale, a TBI scale — and somberly told his family that Grant would never wake up.

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It is one of the most severe injuries Dr. Kevan Craig has ever seen. Craig is Grant’s doctor and director of rehabilitative medicine at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, one of the nation’s largest pediatric hospitals.

“It is not the most serious — because if it was more serious, he wouldn’t recover,” Craig said.

In stark contrast from the diagnosis three months ago, doctors now say Grant will have a complete physical recovery. His cognitive recovery is progressing, but remains uncertain.

His mother — a fitness and nutrition expert, former co-host of “Freaky Eaters” on TLC and New York Times bestselling nutrition author — has detailed his progress to more than 13,000 followers on Facebook.

She and Grant’s dad, John, supplement his hospital care with 20 grams of fish oil every morning, protein shakes packed with amino acids like glutamine and regular rub downs with essential oils.

They have consulted with doctors and researchers across the nation — names like Dr. Donald Stein, director of the Brain Research Laboratory at Emory School of Medicine, and Dr. Barry Sears, developer of The Zone Diet and a leading voice on how the diet impacts hormonal response and inflammation — to lend their expertise.

“I think it’s a miracle,” JJ Virgin said. “I also think it’s the intersection between traditional medicine, integrative medicine, and what I’m going to call energy medicine — the power of prayer from around the world.”

Three months into Grant’s recovery, most worrisome is his cognitive recovery. He has virtually no short-term memory, and Craig must reintroduce himself daily. Grant still has violent outbursts, a common side effect of a traumatic brain injury, and his speech is limited.

“He is still by no means out of the woods,” said Craig, his doctor. “He still has a lot of things that can go wrong with him. But Grant is giving us hope.”

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A slow process

A security guard sits outside room 658.

The room is in the corner of the sixth floor, past an atrium with high ceilings and colorful paintings on the wall. The occasional child in a wheelchair or walker appears in the quiet hallway.

A sign is taped to the door with a message scrawled in green marker: “Please check with nurse prior to entering room.”

Inside, Grant lies in a Posey Bed, a twin-size hospital bed with a tent-like cover that his parents or nurses zip up and clip closed. It protects him and everyone around him during outbursts.

With the final cast removed in early December, the physical signs of his crash are fading. The scratches across his nose have healed, and the feeding tubes and IVs are long gone. His final cast was taken off in early December.

For three hours every day, he works in 30-minute sessions with a rotation of therapists — music, occupational, physical, psychiatric and speech among them.

He now stands, a task that requires most of his concentration but is easier each day. He leans on a walker, with two therapists holding onto him, as he walks, step by step, about 10 feet to his wheelchair.

Though Grant does not remember any of their names, he usually thanks each person as they walk out the door.

One of Grant’s parents is at his side almost every waking hour, including during those therapy sessions. They answer his pleas to go home. They plan out his meals. They control his outbursts.

He does not know why he is in the hospital — doesn’t remember the accident — and he does not understand why he cannot go home.

“I wanna go home,” Grant says, one of the sentences he speaks regularly through a fog of sedatives. Doctors are easing him off a heavy dose of painkillers and anti-psychotic medications.

During physical therapy earlier this month, he laid on a mat and did sets of leg lifts and pelvic thrusts. He walked about 10 feet to his wheel chair.

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He called his dad over: “Hey,” he said. “When can I go home?”

His dad leaned over, resting his hand on Grant’s shoulder, and launched into a speech that he repeats to Grant several times a day:

“I know, buddy. I want to go home, too,” John Virgin said. “We will when we can get all of this under control. So we’re going to work with the therapists the best we can. The better we do with them, the faster we go home, OK?”

A team effort

Back in his hospital room, one corner is filled with bright orange “Get Well” posters signed by his classmates. An iPod speaker rests on a dresser, alongside scattered empty coffee cups and a framed picture of his girlfriend.

The nurses keep his stock of fish oil in the staff refrigerator and one of the cupboards in his room is taken over by boxes of Emergen-C vitamin supplement.

Almost immediately after his crash, JJ Virgin sent a mass email to her extended network in the medical field: “I don’t need your sympathy, but I do need your strength,” she wrote.

Friends — nutritionists, neurologists, researchers — from across the country stepped up to offer their assistance in different treatments for brain injuries.

“We’ve got this dream team of people supporting us. We’re really lucky,” JJ Virgin said. “But I am the 1 percent. What about everyone else?”

JJ Virgin is a certified nutrition specialist and former president of the National Association of Nutrition Professionals, the professional group for holistic nutritionists.

“For the public, my thing is weight loss. For him, I started studying everything I could,” JJ Virgin said.

The competing worlds of integrative and traditional medicine, she said, “need to understand their roles.

“The war has to stop.”

As soon as she felt comfortable it would not interfere with his medications, she began a regimen of high-dose fish oil. Advocates believe the Omega-3 fatty acids fight inflammation, while skeptics say the benefits are overstated.

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While European hospitals have been more accepting of fish oil, especially for heart attack patients, the Food and Drug Administration has been hesitant.

It approved the first prescription use of fish oil in 2004 when it gave the OK to what was then known as Omacor, but it carries a label that warns that studies on fish oil are supportive, but not conclusive, for helping heart disease.

The FDA has delayed rulings for months this fall on a different fish oil supplement, and most hospitals across the nation won’t allow high levels of fish oil.

So Grant’s parents said they sneaked more into Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where Grant stayed for nine weeks.

“Hospitals are going to be careful about things when there’s no research trials, because they’ve got liability,” JJ Virgin said.

“So that’s what you’re stuck with with no one wanting to take the risk — but to me, the bigger risk is your kid not ever healing,”

Finding balance

Before he was hit, Grant had settled into a routine for the first time in his life.

After years of rotating through therapists and treatments for bipolar disorder, Grant was on a set of medications that worked for him.

Grant, his 15-year-old brother, Bryce, and their friends would hop the fence after school to the Virgins’ house, where they would bounce off the walls.

Several months into his relationship with his first girlfriend, Grant called her parents to negotiate going on a date if she finished her chores or her homework.

“He was just like he is now. He’s got a stubborn streak a mile-and-a-half long,” John Virgin said.

“He wants what he wants, and he wants it now.”

A junior in high school, Grant seemed headed down an entrepreneurial path like his mother, possibly designing websites. He learned HTML, then bought his dad “HTML for Dummies.”

“They say you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans,” John Virgin said. “We had our plans, and that woman changed it all.”

On Sept. 10, Grant left school early with a migraine.

Because he’d missed class, his parents would not allow him to go to his usual martial arts class. Upset, Grant decided to walk a few blocks to his friend’s house.

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It’s a familiar walk. He makes it barefoot.

No one knows exactly how Grant ended up lying in the road.

Nearby drivers saw a female driver get out of her car and look at something in the road. Then she drove away. The next driver saw Grant in the road.

One man parked his car so that it shielded Grant’s body, while a second driver — one of the Virgins’ neighbors — dialed 911.

As police crowded onto the scene, John Virgin drove up with his younger son on the way to the store.

They paused near the commotion on the street and asked a deputy what had happened.

The deputy described the unidentified pedestrian, then asked what the Virgins’ older son looked like.

As John described Grant to the deputy, the deputy pointed to Bryce and asked: “Looks like him?”

A dark period

For the next 18 hours, Grant’s blood pressure dropped to a dangerous 60/40 and remained there. Surgeons worked feverishly to repair the aorta.

Doctors warned Grant’s family that he may never wake up. If he did, he would not recognize his family.

Within hours, the Virgin family decided to move Grant from Desert Regional Medical Center to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, a level I trauma center in Torrance.

They knew that Grant had little chance of surviving a significant move — doctors warned he had an 80 percent chance of dying in flight — but they felt they had no choice.

Dr. Carlos Donayre, an endovascular pioneer who was among the team that completed the first aortic stent graft placement of its kind in the country, was there.

“That man is God to me,” John Virgin said.

Grant emerged from his coma weeks after that surgery and spoke his first words Oct. 14 — 33 days after the crash — when he told his girlfriend he loved her.

He sped through the coma and wakening phases, but ran into a new hurdle.

Grant’s outbursts were more severe than usual, Craig said. He blamed it on the “wiring” of Grant’s brain, noting that “pre-existing conditions” can be exacerbated by brain injuries.

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Grant has punched, kicked, and bit the people around him. His father has bruises inside his upper arm and a scab on his elbow from the outbursts.

Twice daily at his worst, the outbursts have dwindled. They happen more like once a week now, but nurses still whisper about his mood in the morning and warn visitors to stand back if Grant gives “ a look.”

“If anyone did not agree, then he would just belt them if he could,” Craig said. “He hurt several people, including his father.”

Costly care

The bills are piling up.

His parents have racked up $15,000 in hotel bills and short-term rent leases, gas and parking.

They have seen only a few tallies: $30,000 for the helicopter ride from Palm Desert to Palm Springs, and then an additional $82,000 to fly him to the hospital in Torrence.

The nine-week stay at Harbor, which included three weeks in the intensive care unit, was out-of-network for the Virgins’ insurance plan, and they don’t know how much it will ultimately cost.

John and JJ, who divorced 10 years ago, have recently shared the same house in Palm Desert to help the boys through difficult teenage years.

Now, they rent a Los Angeles condo, too, that is near the hospital. They take turns staying there.

John Virgin had planned to move back to his native Florida in January and return to practicing law.

Earlier this month, JJ Virgin left on a national book tour after “The Virgin Diet” came out. The Nov. 27 release date and the tour have been more than a year in the making.

While his parents usually trade shifts, each spending several consecutive days at the hospital, while JJ was away, John Virgin spent the entire two weeks at the hospital.

He lifted Grant from the hospital bed into his wheelchair. He calmed Grant. He planned lunches. He talked to therapists.

“It’s my twelfth straight day, 12 to 14 hours a day,” John Virgin said at one point. “I’m lucky I know my own name.”

Bryce, a sophomore at Palm Desert High School, stays with friends. He got straight A’s in school the first quarter.

Earlier this month, his father planned to spend 14 hours at the hospital with Grant, drive at least two hours to Palm Desert to pick up Bryce and then return to Los Angeles. Bryce sensed his father’s exhaustion, assured him he would be OK and told his father to take the night to rest.

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“He’s 14 going on 45,” John Virgin said of his younger son.

'He's in there'

After more than one month at the rehabilitative center, Grant was given his first day pass last weekend. He left the hospital with his family, who brought the family dog.

He plans to leave again on Christmas Day to visit the nearby condo where his parents stay.

Doctors estimate he could be released from Children’s Hospital about Jan. 15 for the next phase of his rehabilitation. JJ Virgin wants that to be at home, thinking the familiar setting and proximity to friends would be best.

Much of the rehabilitation from his injury will be accomplished in the first six months, so by early March for Grant, said Craig, the doctor. Nearly all of it is done within two years after an injury.

“For the near future, he’s going to be dependent on his parents or someone to guide him through life,” Craig said. “For the long-term, the jury’s still out.”

His parents hold out hope that Grant will regain the same functionality as before the crash.

“There is no crystal ball for closed head injuries,” John Virgin said. “No one can predict. But he proves them wrong every day like clockwork.”

The flashes of his humor, his smirks at pretty young therapists or his kisses with his girlfriend all give his parents hope the outlook for his cognitive recovery is good.

“You can tell he’s in there,” JJ Virgin said. “I look at him and think we’re the luckiest people on the planet.”

During occupational therapy this month, his therapists started a game of Connect Four, the childhood game that has players dropping small, colored discs into a grid.

One therapist held a disc far above Grant’s head, imploring him to reach and stretch his muscles for it. He wiggled his fingers, rotating his shoulder to grasp it.

The next round, the therapist again held his piece up high.

This time, though, he darted his eyes to where the Connect Four game box sat.

He stuck his hand into the box, snatched a different disc and dropped it in.

“Did you just cheat?” his therapist asked.

Grant leaned back, broke into a grin, nodded proudly and sputtered into laughter.